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Tuesday, December 31, 2013

`I Am a Sovereign in My Library'

“You double your existence.”

That’s how Alexander Smith, the Scottish essayist,
describes the effect of reading Boswell’s Life
of Johnson. If a book constitutes an alternate life, one where we can enter
at will and set up housekeeping, we might say the same of any worthy volume.
Such books are simultaneously other and self, alien and native. I’m reading Giacomo Leopardi’s
recently translated Zibaldone ("Hodge-Podge"). His is
a sensibility foreign to mine, in some ways repellent, but I read him with
sympathy. Even when he is foolish or posturing, I learn something. I like a little grit in my diet. When he writes,
on Aug. 22, 1820, “Reading is to the art of writing as experience is to the art
of living in the world and knowing about other people and other things,” the
very experience of reading him confirms the observation. Later in “A Shelf in My Bookcase,” when Smith writes--

“Boswell’s unconscious art is wonderful, and so is the
result attained. This book has arrested, as never book did before, time and
decay. Bozzy is really a wizard: he makes the sun stand still.”

--we balk at the near floridness of the language, but
concede the sentiment. Literature is not a zero-sum game. Great writers falter
and mediocre writers stumble into sublimity, though rarely. Smith cultivates
the essayist’s familiar alter ego of gentle, bookish solitary. He’s a less
antic, less tormented Charles Lamb, and a very cozy writer. One reads him in
order to remember that not every great writer is a Leopardi. In “Books and Gardens” he
writes:

“I
call myself a solitary, but sometimes I think I misapply the term. No man sees
more company than I do. I travel with mightier cohorts around me than ever did
Timour or Genghis Khan on their fiery marches. I am a sovereign in my library,
but it is the dead, not the living, that attend my levees.”

Smith was
born on this date, Dec. 31, in 1829, and died on Jan. 25, 1867.